The fashion industry is known for its volatile creatives and unshakable self-seriousness. If you ask anyone who’s worked in fashion or at a magazine if it’s like The Devil Wears Prada, they will likely tell you that’s a G-rated shadow of their lived experience. With our generation’s waning patience with abusive workplaces and megalomaniac bosses, these stories from our collective past are taking on a new light. Often dismissed flippantly as part of “paying our dues,” fashion veterans and current employees alike are re-examining their experiences with newfound clarity. Somehow, even in this relatively progressive era we’ve entered, the fashion industry remains one of the last bastions of unchecked and wildly inappropriate behavior. From former fashion interns to magazine assistants to models, we’re compiling an oral history of fashion workplace experiences in the series Fashion Horror Stories.
After hearing about Anthony’s debauched Fashion Week nights in Milan, we’re his second experience at a New York-based fashion magazine, here is another tale from the early-2000s Fashion Week archive:
Set the scene; where are we in this story?
“The year was around 1999 or 2000, and we were back in Milan for fashion week. It’s so different now than it used to be because this is back when shows actually happened, and people still had money. Every year, people would come to a hotel called the Principe—they would arrive on a Saturday, and the shows would start on Sunday morning. Each year, we would travel with a crew from the magazine I worked at and a few other publications. We would coordinate our flight bookings, and it was literally a flying party bus.”
So the fashion week clique was like your camp friends you would see once a year?
“It was totally like that. And some of them were our clients, so part of our job was to entertain them. Well, entertaining is a nice way to put it. We would basically pay for booze and drugs. I would pay for their drinks, and they would give me drugs. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever actually bought drugs.”
And you were able to bring drugs on the plane? I am assuming this is pre-9/11?
“Totally. The flight was a total zoo. We would start drinking even before we boarded the flight. A rare few people would be denied boarding because they were already wasted. Back then, you had to be really fucked up to not get on the plane—like on the verge of alcohol poisoning.
“Once we were on the plane, there would be a round of dispersal of what we called ‘combo packs.’ Everyone had these little tins. I had a little ornate sterling silver box, and we would put all our pills in it and pass it around. People passed out Valium, Vicodin, and Percocet, and the boxes would make their rounds. People would say, ‘I don’t know what this is. I took a little nibble off of that. I bit off half the giant white one and part of the blue one.’ Three to six hours later, people were sitting in the aisles, laying on top of each other, and all the while, people were constantly drinking because you didn’t need to pay for cocktails on planes back then.
“Being the giant lush that I was, I was always afraid that the plane would somehow run out of alcohol. I would take my little Valentino work bag, go back to where the restrooms were, and grab all those small bottles of wine they had in the back. My horrible boss would also steal liquor, vodka, gin, whiskey, and any small bottle he could find. Between the two of us, we had a pile of shit, and at some point, we had a race to see who could drink as much wine as possible without throwing up.”
I would lose that contest very quickly. Who won?
“I won, and I’m not proud to say this, but I drank 24 of them. They were not full-size bottles of wine but the little two-glass ones.”
I’m surprised you made it out alive.
“I had a lot of pills, too. We would all be completely toasted by the time we got off the plane, and people were definitely crashing. There would be people passing drugs around the bag check area. Unfortunately, it was another hour and a half drive from Malpensa to Milan, but we always had a limousine company to drive us for the week.
“The limo company was definitely not above board in terms of legality. The driver was named Luigi, and he totally looked like one of the Mario Brothers—he was the biggest facilitator and enabler of bad behavior; I mean, that was sort of his job. Stay tuned because he’ll come back later in the story.”
What would happen when you all got to the hotel?
“When you got to your room, there would be a little box at your door. That’s where you would find all your Fashion Week invitations, and sometimes brands would send gifts—often, these ‘gifts’ would be a few joints, maybe a dime bag.”
Were these from luxury fashion brands?
“Yes, but it wasn’t from the brand themselves technically; it was from the PR people at the brand.
“After you picked up your box, everyone would go into their rooms and sleep for about three hours. When you woke up, you felt like you were going to die.
“I don’t know how I used to do it, but after a nap, we would all go downstairs with all our clients, competitors, and models and start up again in the cocktail lounge. A lot went down in that lounge; I saw a male celebrity making out with a male model—and the male celebrity is ‘straight.’”
Who was it? I won’t publish the name.
“It was [REDACTED]. I was shocked.”
What! I guess I can kind of see that, but his interests are just so… straight.
“Yeah, I don’t need him to be gay. The community doesn’t need him. I also can’t stand capped teeth.”
What else went down that night?
“Anyways, so [REDACTED] is full-on making out with this male model, and this is before cell phones or the Internet took off, so you would see this kind of stuff a lot. Heath Ledger was sitting next to them at the booth—you can put his name in there; he was lovely. There was a group of editors who were—very cruelly, I might add—throwing a giant tray of finger sandwiches at models. They were violently throwing sandwiches at these women, screaming, ‘Eat something!’ Heath Ledger was actually trying to calm them down and get them to stop throwing sandwiches. The Italians were somehow cool with it; there was shit flying everywhere.
“You could get away with a lot, but if you were a real asshole to the staff, they would just start putting everyone’s orders on your room tab. At the end of the trip, it was always a joke that we were all terrified to find out our room tab. My boss, who was the biggest asshole, had a tab that was about $4,000.
“There was a lot of debauchery that night. I saw a major fashion editor, a dude, duck into a broom closet with some random guy. Five minutes later, they come out, both rebuttoning their pants. There were also about four or five men from the United Arab Emirates who propositioned me that night. They offered me 10 million Lira to go to their room and do a ‘private show.’”
Like a Vegas showgirl?
“Correct. The creepiest part was that they didn’t read to me as gay guys, and I have some pretty good gaydar. The one guy with the Lira fanned out all the money and held it out in front of me. I obviously declined.”
How much was 10 million Lira at that time?
“It was between $5-6,000, which wasn’t an insignificant amount at the time, but I was like, ‘I have a job.’ That was the Principe lobby, and it was gross.”
It seems like the fashion scene has shifted a lot since that time—and not just in terms of social media, the internet, or how much money there was. There seems to have been a shift, not only in the exclusivity of the scenes but the level of public debauchery and people taking advantage of others. How have you observed that shift?
“Well, I can only speak to the circles I ran in, but I would say a large percentage of the people in the industry were alcoholics or drug addicts—I would say probably 40%. There were maybe 20% who would end up having a problem, about 20% who were sober, 20% who were not alcoholics or addicts—you didn’t see those people very much.
“The way it used to be is something I can’t imagine happening now—sexual propositions for money, sending drugs to somebody’s room—those things just wouldn’t happen today.”
What factors contributed most to that change?
“With the Internet, media and news are being relayed so quickly that people have become more cautious. Someone like my former boss, Humpty, could get away with being a huge bitch back in the day because his status as an industry insider let him get away with that. Power is so much more difficult to obtain and retain now. And the new news cycle usually cancels out historical controversy. There’s no need for these fashion oligarchs.
“One thing that is true about the world I was operating in at that time is that people were really cruel to each other. It was normal. People expected that you paid your dues by getting abused and enduring that abuse. At some point, you pass some sort of ‘test,’ so now you can get promoted to work with other people who are probably as hideous, just in different ways.
“Globalization, cell phones, and all that just made all of that seem much more ridiculous than it actually was, but people have different expectations of each other now, which I think is healthy. Unfortunately, we still live in a world where Donald Trump is not in jail, and people are rewarded for being dishonest and mean, but at least the fashion industry HAS cleaned up a bit.
“A shift has happened, and while it’s less specifically about the fashion industry, there are more conversations from a lot of designers on addiction and sobriety. There is also more attention paid to the financial aspects of the industry, like the Business of Fashion—there’s more focus on making it a business than this image-oriented, liquor-and-drug-soaked bacchanal. Before 9/11, everything was about overabundance—alcohol, drugs, meanness, money, products—everything.
“Oh, I just realized I have another fashion horror story for you. Do you have time for one more?”
I always do.
“I was in Milan, and we had a bunch of market appointments right before the Calvin Klein show. One of our market appointments was for an Italian fashion brand, and the food was—I don’t even know how to describe it—it was just stupid. There was caviar and champagne and just piles and piles of food.
“I ate a finger sandwich. It was a black truffle sandwich—I can still remember what it smells like. A few hours later, I’m in the limo with my editor-in-chief, our fashion editor, and Luigi. In the car, I was teasing my editor because he was this British guy, and I was saying, ‘You all got that nasty shit called Branston Pickle.’ There was a pause in the conversation, and my stomach started making this gurgling, rumbling noise. The editor said, ‘Sounds like you got a little problem in there.’ I was like, ‘I don’t got a…whoa,’ and I realized something was coming up. My stomach was like breathing, puffing up, then almost like exhaling- it was crazy.
“Do you get grossed out easily? I think bodily functions are hilarious, but I just wanted to check before I went on.”
It takes a lot to gross me out. I can warn the readers, though. WARNING: If you are squeamish, do not read further!
“Okay, great. Our car was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic in a line to the show with cars parked alongside the road. My editor and editor-in-chief looked at me with that look where you know they know you’re about to hurl, which always makes you want to hurl just a little bit more. They hopped out of the car and ran because they were going to be late for the show. I got out and ran, not up towards them, but across the street, and it happened—everything came out.
“I wore a gray turtleneck sweater, navy blue high-waisted pants, and a long Gucci trench coat. It was Tom Ford’s second to last season with really big epaulets on it, and I had a cute leather doctor bag—outfit aside, I hurled everywhere. It was coming out with such force that it propelled me backward.”
Like those birds in science class?
“Exactly like that. Meanwhile, while it was happening, I was hysterically laughing—the sounds, the force, I was just being puppeted around by it. Luigi saw where I ran and drove around the corner to get me after dropping off my editors at a show. He ended up pulling around on that side street and got out this big, plaid wool blanket. He wrapped it around me, put his arm behind my knee, and I fell back into his arms. He was a real tree stump of a man, and I’m about one and a half feet taller than him, so the visuals must have been hilarious.
“He put me in the back seat—and he said, ‘We go now.’ He took me back to the hotel, which was the Four Seasons this time. Unlike the Principe, where the elevator was close to the entrance, the elevator at the Four Seasons was across a giant lobby of light-colored marble past the concierge. Luigi walked me through everything and got me to the elevator. One person who came up an hour after it all happened said, ‘You left a trail of sick across the lobby.’”
Wow, Luigi is a hero. How long were you sick?
“I couldn’t leave the room for a day and a half. I was so sick that I could only hyper-fixate on the TV. There were only two channels, so I was either watching Toy Story 2 dubbed in German or a channel called TV Polonia, where I watched this woman build a small house for her guinea pig for hours.
“By the next morning, a lot of people had heard about it, and I started to get ‘concerned’ emails like, ‘I heard you threw up all over the floor of the Four Seasons (stifling a laugh)! I hope you’re okay, bye darling ‘kiss, kiss’ (dial tone).’”
“That’s my worst fashion horror story. I’m glad no one saw it except Luigi and the people at the hotel, but fuck, man, that was bad. I have not eaten any kind of finger sandwich since, and I still cannot eat truffles–of any kind.”
